Baba Is You Review

The indie game market has been saturated in terms of the puzzle genre for some time. Therefore, games like Baba Is You have a lot of work to do to stand out from the crowd. Probably the best way to distinguish themselves is to have innovative or unusual gameplay.

Baba Is You does just that. At the 2017 Nordic Game Jam, Arvi Teikari took inspiration from logic operators to come up with a new type of puzzle. Rather than building satisfying puzzles first, the Finnish developer thought up interesting solutions. He then worked backwards to figure out a way for the player to arrive at that solution. After almost two years of work, the title released on PC and Nintendo Switch on March 13, 2019.

Gameplay

As previously mentioned, Baba Is You takes the idea of logic gates and manipulating them to solve puzzles. Two operator blocks can be linked with different words such as “is” or “and” to influence the level. Every puzzle in the game works the same, meaning you have to push these different blocks to create different effects. Moving the “win” block under the name of another object and the “is” block will make it the goal. Moving a “stop” block from the wall and “is” blocks will make walls passable.

Essentially, players have to change the rules of each level in order to progress. Occasionally, rules are forced by blocks being placed in a locations where you cannot move them. In total, there are more than 200 individual stages to get through and they operate in much the same way.

For the most part, you take control of a little character known as Baba. However, it is possible to play as other characters or objects. Sometimes this is happening from the start of the level but at other times you are forced to take over control. You do this by moving the name of another object to the “is” and “you” blocks. The concept, then, is a fairly simple one. Explaining it in any more detail is difficult as it is far easier to see how it works by playing.